Author: Lucia

It’s mid-February: although the winter here on the West Coast has been unseasonably cold, spring is near, a hopeful thaw on the horizon. As the hours of daylight increase and the crocuses start to bloom, academics across the country are losing sleep, some with nails bitten to the quick, others with churning stomachs. Spring means SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) and graduate-school-acceptance announcement season, and with it, either a quick dashing of dreams or a buoyant sense of relief once students and postdoctoral hopefuls open their letters.

This isn’t my first SSHRC-rodeo. One Masters’ application, five PhD applications (one successful!), and two postdoctoral applications later, I’ve gotten used to the inevitable long wait through autumn and winter and have even gotten used to the stomach-churning anxiety I always face when I am about to tear open that envelope. I am, happy to say, much better at dealing with the disappointment of unsuccessful applications. I can finally say, without pretense or posturing, that I think I do good work, and that my work matters. The more I’ve learned about the scarcity built into the academic system, and after having seen so many fellow brilliant scholars find themselves coming up empty-handed in funding cycles and in job applications, the easier I’ve found it to sigh and grumble about how the system is the problem, rather than me and my inherent failings as a scholar or as a person. Last year, only 156 out of 851 applications received postdoctoral fellowships. I know, in my heart of hearts, that it’s not “personal.” I know that it’s not about “me.”

Note that I said “easier,” not that it has become entirely easy. Like most academics, the lengthy time that I have spent within the ivory tower has meant that in one way or another, my identity and my feelings of self-worth have become enmeshed in my work and in others’ appraisals of it. I take my work seriously; always have. As a child who had few friends, excelling at school was my way of feeling good in the world; no matter how many times I was excluded from social events, I knew that I could work towards the satisfaction of a report card full of As. Of course, as I would later learn, excellence is not the only reason to engage in academic pursuits. During my graduate work, curiosity thankfully took over as the primary motivation for spending long hours engrossed in my research. And yet, in the continued absence of a romantic partner and children, I still take it perhaps more seriously than I should. Work has come to fill my life in a way that I don’t always want it to. After an intense, life-altering trauma that unfolded over the past year, work became a lifeline; at times it was literally the only thing I felt I still wanted to live for. In moments of denial, I used work to stuff down my feelings of shame; it was easier to focus on how I needed to publish more articles and how I needed to be a better academic than it was to focus on worrying about whether or not I would truly end up damaged and alone. Damaged, alone, and without even an academic career to hang my hat on: this is the shame story that I carry with me into this year’s SSHRC season, the oozing narrative that bubbles beneath the surface.

Perhaps my situation is extreme, but I am willing to wager that to equal or lesser degrees, my fellow academics’ relationship to their academic success is somehow related to the shame we are dying to keep quiet. And so, while “UGH, I didn’t get the SSHRC again” may be a simple expression of frustration with the precarity and competitiveness of academia for some, I suspect that for others, it’s often code for “I’m worried that my work isn’t good enough” which is a slippery slide into the all-too-familiar “I’m not good enough.” “I’m not good enough” is the murky swamp of shame that envelops so many of us, and that so many of us are told not to talk about. Academia is where we have full freedom to analyze emotions—sorry, “affect”—but very little freedom or privilege to feel or display emotions, especially for academics who face oppression at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and religion. Even senior academics with the most privilege, I’m sure, close the office door and open their grant letters or teaching evaluations when they know they won’t be disturbed, lest the warm hot rush of shame washes over them when some anonymous former student talks about how horrible they are. For those of us who have experienced shame early in our educational careers—the elementary school teacher who called us stupid, the professor who assured us that we’d never make it in graduate school—the stakes of academic success aren’t just about financial resources and institutional affiliations: they’re about proving that we’re good enough. No matter how successful, no matter whether we do end up finishing that PhD or securing that tenure-track position, those formative moments of shame come back to haunt us again and again. Maybe it’s a hyper-critical parent, a legacy of trauma, the difficulties of marriage, the anxiety of parenthood: we carry so much with us into our lives; so much seeps into things like job applications and funding decisions. Many of us aren’t just using our CVs as documents to list our accomplishments; we’re using them as inventories to keep trying to prove our worthiness.

Dr. Brené Brown, whose research on shame, vulnerability, courage, and wholeheartedness has offered a vital framework for many, points out that shame needs three things to thrive: secrecy, silence, and judgement. How many of us attempt to keep our failed job interviews, our rejected articles, and our feelings of academic unworthiness quiet? How many of us are so afraid to admit that we are terrified about the job market, about our dwindling finances, and about the deep spirals of depression and anxiety that we find ourselves in when we’re not “making it” in academia the way we were expected to? How many tenure-track professors, because they are seen to “have it all,” quietly move through their entire careers feeling like a fraud, never able to talk about the shame of struggling with impostor syndrome? How many of us joke about our dependence on alcohol or food to numb our feelings because we know that we can talk about the things we all do to deal with disappointment and shame, but not about the disappointment and shame itself?

Just to be clear, I not advocating for academia to become a place where we either psychoanalyze each other to death or where we try to build some emotional utopia where we talk about our feelings of shame all day. Good therapists exist for a reason (even though they are usually cost-prohibitive for many academics, but I digress…) What I do wish academia could be is a place where at the very least, we are not discouraged from seeking out help or from seeking out moments of connection when we are struggling simply because we have normalized anxiety, isolation, judgement, and competitiveness. I wish that for every five workshops we hold on how to write a SSHRC proposal, how to polish our CVs, and how to nail a job interview, we had one workshop where we talked earnestly and honestly about how to take care of ourselves and of each other. I wish that for every series on professional development and teaching, senior academics modelled vulnerability and acknowledged struggle. I wish that for every hundred graduate student get-togethers at the pub, we had one afternoon where we could sit down and say, without fear of judgement, “I’m having a hard time.” These moments do happen, don’t get me wrong. But often, they must happen secretly and covertly because otherwise, it is not safe. Express too much vulnerability and you’ll be seen as unable to complete your work because you are too fragile or anxious. Divulge feelings of shame and people will weaponize it against you. This is the reality of our world, by and large. Academia is not exceptional in that way.

7.5 years ago, just as I was about to start my PhD, I was having intense feelings of anxiety. The professor for whom I was working at the time informed me that because of my anxiety, I would fail at my PhD and would be better off withdrawing from the program even before beginning it. 30-year-old me, who is assertive and tries to be vulnerable-yet-courageous wants to march up to that professor and say “how dare you shame vulnerability and reinforce the notion that only the most unemotional and cold-hearted can ever succeed in this world?” 30-year-old assertive, vulnerable-yet-courageous me also wonders what kind of shame and anxiety that professor had to swallow and bury to get through their own career. I am guessing that it is not an insignificant amount. I have developed empathy for my own struggling self; I try to cultivate as much empathy as I can for others who hurt those they might see themselves reflected in. 30-year-old assertive, vulnerable-yet-courageous me feels a lot of empathy for the 22-year-old who was made to feel so goddamn ashamed of herself, has gratitude for the professor who eventually talked me back into the PhD, and constantly fears that we have lost out on developing so many brilliant scholars because their vulnerability was seen as a detriment to their academic career, rather than an asset.

I’m not certain how to revolutionize academia, but I do know that in seasons like this, seasons where emotions run high, that we can care for each other. When our students, our colleagues, our friends, our partners open up to us to say “I didn’t get the SSHRC,” instead of immediately railing against funding bodies or grumbling about someone else not deserving it, what if we asked “how do you feel?” or “what do you need?” If we hear “I didn’t get into a PhD program, and I’m really scared about what this means for my future” or “I’m failing at academia, just like I’m failing at my relationships” can we simply say “I’m here for you if you’d like to talk about it?” Brené Brown makes clear that shame cannot survive when empathy is present. Not sympathy: not the pity of “there but for the grace of national funding bodies or tenure committees go I.” Empathy isn’t tripping over ourselves trying to run away from other people’s suffering by saying “well, cheer up, you’ve always got next year!” or “I’m SURE you’ll get it the next time.” Empathy is sitting with the fact that this is hard. Rejection hurts. Precarity aches. The sexism and racism and classism of the academy kills, no more so than when we are made to internalize its violence and shame.

For my part, I am doing my best to prepare myself to receive my SSHRC results. Part of this preparation has been to try and be curious about my anxiety, to sit with my discomfort, and to speak the shame that lurks in the background so that it doesn’t consume me. The PhD may have been a difficult and rewarding undertaking, but nothing will be more difficult and more rewarding than truly knowing and accepting that no matter what the result—post-doc or no post-doc—that my worthiness as a human being stays the same, neither augmented nor diminished. I promise you, your worthiness does too.

Over at Maclean’s Magazine, Brian Bethune has referred to it as a “CanLit class war.” In The Globe and Mail, Marsha Lederman has dubbed it an “all-out CanLit civil war.” In her various highly publicized statements and Tweets, Margaret Atwood has levied references to North Korean dictatorships, lynching, and the Salem Witch Trials (mostly the latter). I am referring, of course, to the recent painful polarization in the Canadian literary community that has resulted from the publishing and signing of an open letter in support of “due process” for former UBC creative writing instructor Steven Galloway, who was fired from the university for behaviour that created, in UBC’s words, a “an irreparable breach of trust.” Much has been made of the content of the letter itself, as well as the silencing effect of 80+ signatories standing in seeming solidarity not with the complainants of the case, but rather solely with Galloway himself. Speculation around the case has run wild, although with recent confirmation by his lawyers that Galloway was involved in an affair with a student (but also that he was the subject of complaints of sexual harassment and assault) it is hard to deny that the CanLit community must currently reconcile itself with the misconduct of one of its most prominent and powerful members. Hearts are heavy, nerves frayed: understandably so. What strikes me as strange, however—and entirely counter to actually confronting the situation at hand—is the suggestion (by some) that this is a grand ideological and generational rift of contemporary Canadian Literature, and that if only we could hearken back to the days of cozy literary compatriotism, we might be able to heal the wounds caused by this scandal.

For those who may be less familiar with Canadian Literature as a literary community, as a scholarly discipline, and as a national cultural institution (intertwined as these all are, given the tight-knit nature of Canadian literary production and criticism), I can understand why this might seem like a shocking turn of events. After all, literature is so embedded in our collective Canadian consciousness that since 1979, our national broadcasting company has sponsored a prestigious writing competition, one that, as described by the CBC itself, allows “Canada’s best writers [to use] the CBC Literary Prizes as a springboard to national and international acclaim.” Moreover, since 2002, the CBC has also hosted Canada Reads, a “battle of the books” in which five celebrities champion five different books during a week-long, publicly-broadcasted television and radio event which results in the selection of one book that all of Canada should read. This is, all told, a seemingly unique national pastime, and one that is not without both significant economic and cultural impact. As UBC English professor Laura Moss notes in a 2004 editorial in Canadian Literature, the inaugural competition was so terrifically popular that the winning novel, Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of the Lion, “sold approximately eighty thousand copies more in 2002 than in 2001” (6). However, as Moss also points out, her unease about events such as Canada Reads lies precisely in the sort of collective-yet-entirely-depoliticized national spirit that it attempts to promote: “Canada Reads has become a new instrument of culture formation. It is intent on drawing Canadians together by creating a shared cultural background. The winning titles reinforce certain popular notions of Canadianness” (7). In other words, at least part of the public project of Canadian literature, much like the idea of Canada itself, has been to promote a narrative that runs counter to the existing rifts and violent histories within itself.

Twelve years after Moss published this editorial, it is safe to say that the bizarre and mutually reinforcing relationship between Canada and its national literature, at least in its popular and public image, has reached a fever pitch. Writers like Margaret Atwood and Joseph Boyden have become outspoken critics and prominent national voices in conversations around climate change, political freedoms, and Canada’s ongoing legacy of colonialism. To say that Canadian authors have merely adopted the roles of public intellectuals, cultural ambassadors, or social critics would be an understatement; in many cases, their voices and names have actually eclipsed those of other scholars, critics, and intellectuals. In his recent Walrus piece entitled “The CanLit Firestorm,”Simon Lewsen suggests that “along with David Suzuki and the NDP, CanLit was the moral conscience of the nation. That’s not to say it was didactic […] but just that people wrote with a sense of ethical purpose, and readers appreciated their commitment.” This sense of morals or ethics, Lewsen argues, translated into serious cultural power for several Canadian writers, who, whether they wanted it or not, became “CanLit […] heroes—powerful, established heroes, whose reigns lasted decades.”

How our heroes have fallen. In the past week, Margaret Atwood has defended herself against the “bullies” and “keyboard warriors” who are inflicting “burn wounds” and “noose marks” on the signatories of the CanLit letter, and Briarpatch Magazine has removed Joseph Boyden as one of the judges of their “Writing in the Margins” literary contest. Criticism and consequences from within the CanLit community itself: it’s hardly what most would expect, which might explain the shock and awe of media who are attempting to understand precisely what is going on. Even Lewsen suggests that “suddenly, CanLit’s inner circle is looking less like moral trailblazers and more like an establishment—an institution with its own internal values and interests to defend.”

Of course, the truth is that CanLit has always been an institution with its own internal values and interests to defend, and that while Lewsen is correct in suggesting that the “once quiet precincts of CanLit are suddenly more rancorous than they’ve been in decades,” CanLit was never a “community that once seemed harmonious,” particularly for those who have been either pre-emptively or retro-actively excluded, especially when they have actively pushed back against the CanLit establishment. Although I am a Canadianist by training, I do not claim to have a comprehensive view of Canadian literary history and each instance of fissure and fracture within its ranks. What I can say, however, is that a literary tradition that includes the Confederation Poets as part of its origin story—a group of white men and a woman or two, including politician Duncan Campbell Scott, who sought to “get rid of the Indian problem”—is necessarily going to have to constantly fight with its past and ongoing colonial, patriarchal, and white supremacist histories. A literary tradition that has been Anglocentric in nature and has excluded Québécois literature from its canon must confront its past and ongoing Francophobia. A literary history that has either dismissed Indigenous literatures written in Canada, or appropriated them without any recognition of or respect for Indigenous literary and cultural sovereignty, must confront its past and ongoing colonialism. A literary history that includes significant backlash against those who organized the 1994 Writing Thru Raceconference, which was open only to self-identified writers of colour—some called it a “a nasty serving of cultural apartheid” —must confront its past and ongoing white supremacy. A literary history that has traditionally been dominated by men (see the work of Canadian Women in the Literary Arts for their vital work in this area) must confront its past and ongoing patriarchy. A literary history that includes the unlawful seizure of queer literature at the Canadian borders, and the recent attempts to censor and rescind a Governor General-award winning text for its explicit content must confront its past and ongoing homophobia. A literary history that still fails to centre trans writers and disabled writers must confront its past and ongoing transphobia and ableism.

And so, to suggest that CanLit has, as Lewsen has argued, “[operated] under a broadly progressive consensus” is to deny that that the tensions of the past week or so reflect a much broader history of oppression, or as Vancouver poet and scholar Ryan Fitzpatrick has phrased it, that “what gets called CanLit is historically a site of struggle.” To suggest that Canadian literature is somewhat monolithic as a genre, that it ought to encompass a certain canon of texts, or indeed, that its community of writers, critics, and scholars have historically achieved “consensus” of any kind is revisionist history at best. At worst, it perpetuates the kinds of ideological formations of community that make it difficult, if not impossible, for oppressed people to speak up against those who wield power.

CanLit, we might then say, is a kind of “imagined community,” to borrow the term coined by political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson. In 1983, Anderson theorized the nation as a social construction, held up in large part by the idea that while we might never meet most of our fellow countrypersons (or writers, scholars, and critics), we imagine a sort of “communion” between them and ourselves: we project shared interests, mutual values, and a common history, even of all or none of these exist. Perhaps the most pointed and valuable part of Anderson’s notion of “imagined community” is the idea that “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings” (7). Anderson is referring here largely to the context of war, but his argument nevertheless raises questions about similar dynamics within the imagined community that is CanLit: what are the actual inequalities and exploitations that prevail within it? How is this “deep, horizontal comradeship” constructed and upheld, and by whom? How far are we willing—or are forced—to go in order to defend it or suffer for it?

Certainly, in the current CanLit context of Steven Galloway’s firing, we have to acknowledge the dynamics of power that lie within the institutional and educational environments of literary study and instruction. In a field such as creative writing, when professors’ roles as mentors not only include instruction but also function as gateways to literary careers, the power wielded by someone like Galloway is immense, as is the damage caused when this relationship is exploited or violated. In “Stories Like Passwords,” published in The Hairpinin 2014, Emma Healey describes how this power operates, particularly in situations where there is harassment and assault:

“The men in stories like this always have just enough power, in their little worlds and in ours, that to confront them would be to court an ordeal, to invite others to question our own memories and motives. It’s always more trouble than it’s worth. If you don’t have hard proof, if you don’t have a police report, then what do you have? Only what you remember. Only what you felt.”

Safe to say that given the repercussions—both personal and professional—of reporting any sort of misconduct or harassment (be it the theft of a student’s work or an assault perpetrated against them) has to be carefully weighed against the realities of the systems we currently operate within. It takes immense courage to come forward with a complaint, because as who have reported various forms of misconduct, violence, and oppression know all too well, there are truly few benefits to doing so (despite the claims that there is a pot of gold at the end of the survivor-rainbow, which I can certainly attest to being nothing but a falsehood perpetuated by victim-blamers). Rather, there are likely more consequences: the loss of friends, the loss of a potential career, the loss of income, the loss of time, the loss of sleep, the loss of trust. And so on. More often than not, I suspect, victims do not come forward precisely because they have been conditioned to worry about the health and wellbeing of “the community” over and above their own. Don’t cause a fuss. Don’t disturb the peace. It’s for the greater good.

While we have a tendency to individualize the problem of violence and misconduct within our communities—“bad apples” or “lone wolves,” depending on the case—we know, too, that there are systems of power that actively uphold and defend those who enact harm. I don’t mean to suggest that this is always deliberate. I doubt that the all of the signatories of the Open Letter are part of some scheming cabal of CanLit literati who seek to destroy anyone who speaks ill of them or deigns to file a complaint against one of their own. (They’re not.) Rather, the system – the entire system – is built to accommodate those who do harm, and it is upheld by much more than a few staunch defenders or unwitting apologists. As Healey puts it:

These men do not work, or live, or act in a vacuum. Unless they are masterminds or psychopaths (and they cannot all be), their behavior, or aspects of it, is often visible. These men are everywhere. They write and they edit and they teach. They have small magazines and small presses and small reading series. They have publishers and editors, they have podcasts and publicists sending them books to review. The influence they wield may seem insignificant to those in their community who have moved beyond their reach, but for those who haven’t, it is more than enough to frighten or threaten or silence. Their power comes from institutional support, whether implied or explicit, and it comes from systems that rely on the victims of harassment to be the ones who take down their abusers by speaking out in public.

I remind you once again: this is decidedly not new, and certainly not limited to UBC or Galloway or even the field of creative writing. These power dynamics and forms of institutional support predate Galloway and will follow him, too. After all, Healey’s piece was published in 2014, a full year before the first rumblings were stirred about the Galloway case, as was CWILA’s project “Love, Anonymous,” which, in the wake of Ghomeshi, offered a series of stories about various experiences of assault and abuse within Canadian literary communities. It is true that the Galloway case has emerged as a distinct flashpoint in the national conversation on institutional policy and procedure, sexual misconduct, and sexual violence, and it is also true that it very publicly centres these issues in the literary community like perhaps never before. But it is not new, has never been new, will never be new: it is embedded in our society, of which CanLit is (despite the utopian yearnings of writers’ unique enlightenment) certainly a part.

If can we acknowledge that CanLit as both an abstract construct and as a concrete community of people have always been marred and complicated by power and violence, then we are asked to face a much broader and more frightening reality, which is that regardless of whether or not Galloway was fired, and regardless of whether or not his grievance is successful, that there are serious issues to be faced within the community. As much as I agree wholeheartedly that university processes of handling such cases are inherently flawed (insofar as they work to protect the institutions, not the faculty, students, or staff), and that systemic change must be made in order to give due process and fair treatment to both complainants and respondents, we cannot rely on universities and the police alone to somehow solve the problem of violence and abuses of power. That Judge Boyd did not “substantiate” the complaint of sexual assault against Steven Galloway does not mean that it did not occur, which many seem to be conveniently forgetting. Even in the criminal justice system, a lack of charges laid in a case does not mean that a case is unfounded (which would mean that the police has proved that the claim was false).

A lack of evidence as considered by universities and the law does not mean that we are absolved of having to consider these matters within our own circles. With the gross abuses of many universities and police forces—see the recent events in Val d’Or, where dozens of Indigenous women’s cases of abuse by Sûreté du Québec police officers were dismissed—we also need to divest ourselves of the colonial power of these systems, because they are and will continue to be stacked against those who are the most vulnerable. I am not suggesting that rather than develop a stand-alone sexual assault policy, that UBC simply dispense of any and all of its responsibility. As a survivor of sexual assault at UBC, and as a member of the expert panel tasked with making recommendations about best practices for the policy, I have spent years railing against the injustices of the system. I understand the frustration so profoundly. I do.

In addition to advocating for institutional change that treats both parties fairly, I am also suggesting that CanLit as a community consider its own responsibilities, duties, and accountabilities towards each other: the responsibility not to abuse positions of power; the duty to recognize our privileges; the accountability to all members of a community, especially those who are most vulnerable. We owe this particularly towards the woman who has just broken her silence about the case, whose story – whose existence, whose life – will not simply disappear when UBC’s arbitration is completed. We owe this to current and future generations of Canadian writers, scholars, and critics, many of whom have shared their stories in “Love, Anonymous,” many who are sharing their stories quietly, across the whisper network, and many who will never share their stories at all.

We do this not by calling for a healing or cease-fire within our community, or by ignoring the elephant in the room: that a woman has come forward with a story about assault at the hands of a prominent Canadian writer, and that there are many other such stories circulating within the community.

She, more than anyone, has gotten lost in this whole mess.She, more than anyone, deserves to be more than an anecdote in a story about how a literary community waged a “civil war,” deserves to be heard over our din of self-congratulation and self-defense, rationalization and rage, deserves to be more than an example of how UBC fails miserably when it comes to sexual assault allegations, deserves to be more than a blip in Canadian literary history.

The University of British Columbia University Sexual Assault Panel‘s report, which provides recommendations for both the university’s stand-alone policy as well as their sexual assault action plan, goes to President Martha Piper today, and it will have its public release at a date soon to be determined. I have spent the past three months working weekly with a group of excellent and committed UBC faculty members on this report. We have all put in more hours than originally anticipated, and in the last few weeks in particular I have been living and breathing this report every single day. This has been difficult, and I must emphasize, completely voluntary work. It has been work that comes with more costs than it does rewards.

And there have been costs for me, ones that I cannot even yet fully grasp.

While it has been a choice to go public and to advocate for change around sexual assault in educational institutions, it has also changed my life irrevocably, and not always for the better. I have given up my privacy. In many cases, I have given up my dignity: the most traumatic incidents of my life have become fodder for trolls on the internet. In being such a vocal critic of universities, I have also potentially signalled my liability as an employee in academic spaces. I do not have the protection of job security or the academic freedom that comes with a tenured position. I have tried to do all of this work while also balancing my research and my teaching. It is financially precarious, emotionally and intellectually arduous, and often frighteningly lonely.

In doing this work, I have also lived and re-lived some of the most humiliating and traumatizing incidents of my life. It is no coincidence that of the six incidents of sexual assault I have experienced since 2002, five of them have taken place on the campuses of educational institutions, UBC included. As is evident by so many of the stories coming out in the press, educational spaces are ones in which violence often goes un-checked, or worse, covered-up. Policies are lacking. Resources are non-existent or understaffed. Education around responding to disclosures is not always present or consistent. In the past three months, as I have had to give more thought to how UBC should be better equipped to respond to reports and disclosures of sexual assault, I have thought about my own assault that took place at UBC more than five years ago, one that I pushed as far into the recesses of my mind as possible so that I could focus on my doctoral degree.

I should say that deciding not to deal with that sexual assault more or less succeeded. To the outside world, anyway. In the years after my assault in 2011, I received federal funding for my scholarly work; I became a Liu Scholar at the Liu Institute for Global Issues; I presented my work at numerous national conferences; I’ve published in top journals in my field; I’ve become a consultant on national and provincial anti-violence initiatives; I’ve sat on countless panels, given countless interviews, written countless articles. I passed my doctoral defence with only two typos as revisions. My C.V., which details the past six years of my doctoral career, reads almost flawlessly, as if nothing ever happened.

But something did happen.

A few weeks into the spring term of 2011, just over a year into my doctoral program, I was sexually assaulted in the graduate lounge of my department, by student who had recently graduated from the program. I will spare you the preamble and the gory details, not because I am ashamed, but because they don’t particularly matter, and I am, despite my public persona, an intensely private person. But what you need to know is that I was terrified. Having someone’s arm crushing your sternum, and very nearly your throat, will do that do you. And afterwards, I was lost. I sought help at the Sexual Assault Support Centre, which, at that time, was located at the back corner of the old Student Union Building, right on the edge of what used to be MacInnes Field. In order to get to the front door of the SASC, you had to walk through and past all of the SUB’s garbage and recycling bins. I hope I do not need to explain that the fact that accessing support services adjacent to the building’s trash disposals made me feel as though I, too, was trash. Having tried to report sexual assault during high-school (and getting nowhere) and reporting stalking in my time at SFU (and only getting a rape whistle and a pamphlet), I knew that I wasn’t about to try yet again to receive any sort of justice. So I said nothing. And I did my work. It wasn’t the first time I’d been assaulted, and as it turns out, wasn’t the last. Somehow, violence can take on a strange sense of ordinariness. It becomes a thing that just happens before you get back to work.

Except when you dream about it. Except when it affects every single moment of your life. Except when you’re in crowds, or small spaces, or big crowds, except when you don’t have a seat close to the exit in the room, except when someone frightens you. Except then.

If this is the way things are for me, I want things to be different for others.

Truthfully, I want to live in a world where sexual violence doesn’t exist at all, but if that can’t happen, I want to live in a world where survivors of sexual assault are supported and believed, and where there are robust systems of accountability for both perpetrators and institutions. I believe that the judicial system is flawed, and that we need better options for education and rehabilitation.

I know that I don’t have all the answers.

But what I know is this: I want to live in a world where my fellow survivors and allies do not have to file human rights complaints (Mandi Gray – York University, Glynnis Kirchmeier – University of British Columbia) against their institutions because they are being failed; where we do not have to go to the media because the schools we attend will not listen otherwise. I want to live in a world where survivors do not feel as if they have no choice but to drop out of school, as recently happened at Simon Fraser University. I want to live in a world where survivors, like Lizzy Seeberg, do not take their lives because they are, as Rehtaeh Parsons’ father put it regarding his daughter’s suicide, “disappointed to death” by systems that re-traumatize and re-violate survivors.

I know that the report will not fix everything.

Nor will the policy. Nor will all the blue phones in the world. Because horrible things still happen. Nor do I think everything at UBC is broken, either. There are many good people working in a complicated and often-broken system, one that is ultimately dependent on the fact that a university is not simply a place of learning, but also a business. There are already so many front-line workers (those at the SASC in particular, under the leadership of the incredible Ashley Bentley) and staff members who provide services to sexual assault survivors at UBC every day.

There are UBC faculty who have signed the petition demanding better for their students, and apologizing for not having done enough. They organized a fantastic day of discourse and dialogue around sexual assault in February of this year. I am grateful especially to other students who are doing such amazing work: the ones who worked tirelessly in the decades before I even arrived on campus, the ones who I have stood with in my own time as a student, the ones who take up the torch now. This journey has connected me to so many of you, not just at UBC, but across the country, and although we have come together under such awful circumstances, I am so glad and grateful to know you. I wish you didn’t have to go through this. I know it’s such hard work. I keep a fire for you in my heart, always.

At the end of the day, I am not a faculty member, nor an administrator, nor a politician. I do not hold exceptional power within the UBC system. I am just a person who has been fortunate enough to hear stories that have been disclosed to me in whispers and private messages and phone calls. I am humbled by those stories, even as they keep me up at night, worried. I am just a person who has gone through some extremely difficult experiences, ones that I don’t care for anyone else to have to go through. That these experiences have occurred in the context of my schooling is painful; painful because school has otherwise been a place of joy for me, painful because sexual violence formed part of a curriculum I had no desire to have delivered to me. I have, as Raymond M. Douglas writes in his book On Being Raped, gained knowledge, but “not the sort that does you, or anybody else, any good. When I was raped, I learned things about myself and the world I live in that it would have been far better not to know. And for most of my adult life, the knowledge has been killing me” (4). I could have happily gone through my educational career without these particular insights. I could even have written my dissertation on representations of sexual violence without the added expertise of lived experience.

Having finished my PhD, I now leave the hallowed halls of UBC behind, hoping that in some small measure, they have become a better place for survivors because I and others have spoken up, and because panels like the one I was privileged to be a part of are doing the work that they are doing. I am aware of the fact that the increased scrutiny of the university’s response to sexual assault has been a nightmare for students, faculty, staff, and administrators alike.

But I don’t think that the fact that UBC is currently under pressure to respond thoughtfully is a bad thing. Following the publication of his book Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, Jon Krakauer faced incredible amounts of backlash by the town of Missoula itself, by the University of Montana, and by the police force. As reported by Jacob Baynham on Outside Online, one woman left this comment on Krakauer’s Facebook page: “I am so disappointed in the title of your book,” said one woman on Krakauer’s Facebook page. “I hate to see a lovely town’s reputation get destroyed.” But as Krakauer points out, Missoula is just one example of the epidemic of sexual violence across America. Missoula could just as easily be Stanford, could just as easily be here in Vancouver. But the conversation sparked by such intense scrutiny has, at least as far as is being reported, created actual change. After a town hall forum in Missoula, Baynham reports that Krakauer was asked if he’d send his daughter to the University of Montana. “I would,” he said. “I think the university is safer now than most schools. Missoula is a lot better than most places. You have this big problem, but you’ve gone a long way toward fixing it.”

I think that the University of British Columbia can be a Missoula: not the school to be made a painful and humiliating example of, but the school that paves the way for comprehensive change at all levels of administration and campus life, and does in a way that does not simply prioritize supporting sexual assault survivors because it will look like a better strategy for fundraising. Call me an idealist, but I think it’s possible. And there are so many people, myself included, who want to make that happen. There are countless people with whom our panel consulted of the course of our work. The university’s draft sexual assault policy has been released, and both campus and community stakeholders are invited to give feedback here.

But for now, I take my leave from my alma mater, look for brave new worlds. There is so much anti-violence work out there to do, and I will continue to do it. May the development of the UBC sexual assault policy and the action plan be an honest process, tempered by humility and by courage. For all of the survivors of sexual assault who live and work at UBC: I love you, I am in awe of you, I believe you.

It’s that time of year again: as the dog days of summer wind down, Canadian universities are preparing to welcome a whole new cohort of incoming students. The now-empty quads and concourses will soon be abuzz with throngs of students kicking off the start of their university careers with the wide array of activities and services designed to ease their transition into the post-secondary experience. From BBQs to clubs days, from pub nights to residence and faculty-specific orientations, students are being introduced to both the academic and extra-curricular cultures specific to each university campus.

Yet, the start of the 2014-2015 school year isn’t necessarily footloose and fancy-free. Numerous post-secondary institutions in Canada are still dealing with the fallout of many notorious incidents on their campuses in the previous school year.

Image from the Ubyssey’s coverage of the rape chants at UBC-Vancouver.

In September 2013, both Saint Mary’s University and the University of British Columbia came under fire when student orientation leaders were discovered to have led students in rape chants and anti-Indigenous chants as part of “team-building” exercises, chants which ultimately were found to have been a part of some orientation traditions for many years. In the wake of condemnation by both the public as well as university administrators, many student leaders resigned, and others were compelled to take part in anti-violence training.

From April 2013-October 2013, a total of six sexual assaults on female students occurred at the University of British Columbia. The perpetrator responsible for these attacks remains at large.

In January 2014, the McMaster Redsuits (students from the McMaster Engineering Society) were suspended over a FROSH songbook that included “around 25 cheers and includes multiple references to violent rape, murder, incest, bestiality and sex with underage females. It is also rife with misogynistic and homophobic slurs” (Campbell & Ruf). The suspensions have barred the MES from participating in 2014 Welcome Week events.

In Feburary 2014, a female candidate in student elections at the University of Ottawa, Anne-Marie Roy, was the target of sexually explicit commentary by fellow students. As Diane Mehta of The Canadian Press reported, these messages “included references to sexual activities some of the five individuals wrote they would like to engage in with Roy, including oral and anal sex, as well as suggestions that she suffered from sexually transmitted diseases.”

In March 2014, the University of Ottawa men’s hockey team was suspended over allegations of a sexual assault perpetrated by two of their players. As the Ottawa Sun’s Danielle Bell reports, the head coach was aware of the sexual assault, but failed to report it to university officials: as such, the team has been suspended for the 2014-2015 season, and the coach has been dismissed. Recently, the two players – David Foucher and Guillaume Donovan – have both been charged with one count each of sexual assault.

Clearly, it’s been a tough year, for students, parents, faculty, staff, and administrators. Addressing issues of sexual violence and the normalization and trivialization of sexism and racism has been a complex undertaking. In addition to sanctioning student leaders who promote sexism (even under the guise of “jokes”), and rightly punishing students who commit acts of sexual violence, several universities have put together task forces in order to try and create best practices for addressing these issues, including an increase in the availability of safety measures and support services for students, staff, or faculty who have been harassed or assaulted.

Given the widespread coverage that the past year’s incidents have received, I had been hopeful that FROSH 2014 would take on a different tone, and that undergraduate students would be encouraged to create community and solidarity – to break the proverbial ice – around anything but sexism, objectification, harassment, or violence.

Yet, as this school year begins, students, staff, faculty, alumni, and administrators at a Canadian university are finding themselves dealing yet again with a student-led initiative that uses sexual harassment as a basis for creating a welcoming environment for incoming students.

As part of their special FROSH-week edition, the undergraduate student newspaper at Western University, The Western Gazette, included a “satirical” article written by Robert Nanni, entitled “So you want to date your TA?” Among the “tips” that Nanni provides, he suggests that students a) Facebook “stalk” their TAs and get to know their personal interests; b) dress provocatively in order to gain attention; c) use office hours in order to score alone time with their TA. Finally, Nanni writes, students should know when to stop their pursuit of their TAs: they may have to resign themselves to not getting laid. After all, “they may not be giving you head, but at least they’re giving you brain. Don’t be too disappointed though – after all, there’s always next term.”

Professors and Teaching Assistants may be chili-pepper worthy on RateMy Prof, but they’re still professionals with a job to do – a job they take very seriously.

Shortly after the article’s publication on August 20th, teaching assistants, alumni, students, and professors alike expressed their staunch criticisms of the piece. A commenter named Kelly writes: “This is disgusting. Teaching Assistants are employed, as experts in training, by universities to facilitate student learning. It is a job, and this kind of behaviour from students is not tolerated and should not be encouraged. I would report a student immediately for inappropriate behaviour like this. As a teaching assistant and PhD Candidate, I find it insulting and inappropriate to publish this, because it implies a lack of professionalism from TAs and undermines their authority and knowledge.”

Another commenter, “TA/Adjunct,” commented: “As has been mentioned, many TAs at Western are women who must battle against a sexist university culture that insists they are not as smart as men, or that they are only here because they have something to prove. I’ve seen this with my female colleagues many, many times. Too many to count. I was also on the receiving end of very unwanted and unwelcome sexual advances by a student. It put me in an unbelievably precarious position, even more than I already was a low paid TA.”

Despite the backlash against the article (including a letter penned by Dr. Janice Deakin, Western U’s Provost & VP-Academic), the paper’s editor-in-chief, Iain Boekhoff, maintains that the article is, quite simply, a piece of satire, despite compelling evidence (especially by TAs themselves!) that the satire fails miserably in hitting any sort of humourous mark.

The problems with the article have already been well-commented on, and I agree wholeheartedly with the criticisms. TAs are professional members of the university community, ones who are bound by a series of professional codes and boundaries, and who deserve much more than being objectified and sexualized by the students they are meant to teach and mentor.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed that Boekhoff refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the criticisms, the seriousness of sexism and harassment, and to acknowledge that perhaps, the paper might have erred in publishing the piece. Even though he maintains that this is an opportunity for the paper to learn and do better in future, he stands by the piece being published, and refuses to take it down from the website. However, there are two main reasons why I’m really disappointed in Boekhoff’s reaction, and why I think his statements do a disservice to university communities: one, they resort to the tired old stereotypes of those who dare to call out sexual harassment and sexual objectification; two, because they make excuses for a lack of accountability within the campus community, and within student journalism more broadly.

As reported by Mike Donachie in the Metro News, Boekhoff dismisses the outrage as the product of a small group of clearly over-reactive individuals: “I had one complaint late Sunday night which is after three days of people losing their minds on Twitter,” he said. “This thing is entirely Twitter.” I can’t say I’m surprised that Boekhoff would choose to say that the measured criticisms, including those by prominent professors and community members, are tantamount to people “losing their minds.” After all, the discourses of “craziness” are so often-applied to those who protest against harassment and sexism that it is almost to be expected. When news of the rape chants broke last year, there was an incredible amount of condemnation of the complainants on the basis of their apparent “lack of reason,” namely that they were oversensitive, unable to take a joke, or simply so unstable that they would take offense even at the most mild forms of humour. Not to mention, of course, that Twitter activism has often been maligned in the same manner, that those who react to incidences of sexism are merely keyboard warriors, whipped into a hashtag-fueled, emotional frenzy, who have nothing better to do than point out the fault in seemingly-innocuous media. By creating a divide between “official” complaints and those offered on the website’s comment section and via Twitter, Boekhoff is essentially suggesting that there are less legitimate (and therefore, less reasonable) forms of complaint and criticism – forms which ultimately, are not to be taken as seriously.

In an interview with Zoe McKnight at the Toronto Star, Boekhoff turned his attention yet again to the ways in which his critics simply lacked a sense of humour or an adequate interpretive lens: “The role of the student press is different from the role and standards of the mainstream press … Students view things from a different vantage point than adults or university administration.”

In suggesting that the role of the student press is different than that of mainstream media outlets, Boekhoff is seemingly suggesting that student writers and editors are not professionals who are capable of being both respected as well as being held to account in the same ways as “real professionals” are. However, student newspapers are not underground or anonymous zines, nor are they views expressed on personal blogs or webpages. They are organizations that are funded by students’ tuition fees, and ones that thus bear strong affiliations with the universities themselves. And so, when the employees and students of the institution on your masthead have a serious issue with the content you’re presenting, especially when it so clearly contravenes the policies of safe workplaces, it is deeply unprofessional to pull the “we can’t be held accountable like the grownups/professionals are” line. This is not to say that university papers, including their individual writers and editors cannot ultimately choose to stand by their work, no matter how profoundly others disagree. Yet, in asserting that they ought not to be held to the same standards, they thus also give up the right to be given the same respect as professional media outlets, which is an insult to the hundreds of committed student journalists and editorial team who work to produce these papers.

Student newspapers, just like student-led orientations, organizations, and athletics teams, are a vital part of a thriving campus community. A university newspaper provides not only a way for students to keep on top of the current events on their campus, and an opportunity for budding journalists to cut their teeth in the business, but also gives students a way to expose the problems and issues within the community, and in doing so, keep the community accountable. Indeed, news of the rape chants at UBC were first broken by Arno Rosenfeld, a reporter with The Ubyssey, who conducted a thorough series of interviews and investigations into the issue, even after the story had been picked up by major news outlets. Because the staff of these papers are students’ peers and representatives, there is an powerful bond of trust that goes along with working in student journalism: student reporters often have connections within the campus community that outside media do not, and the peer-bond can often make these reporters and editors feel more trustworthy.

In pointing out the issues with FROSH orientation events, or athletic teams, or student organizations, or student newspapers, critics, especially those from within the campus community, are rarely out on a mission to collapse, defame, or destroy these parts of campus culture. We are not rallying to eliminate Greek life, protesting to shut down all Orientation events, or stopping the presses at university papers. Rather, we are recognizing that these parts of campus culture are important enough, and provide enough positive sources of community-building and leadership that we want to work together to ensure they aren’t made unsafe by misguided and deeply offensive articles, racist or sexist chants, or actual instances of sexual violence, harassment, or sexism.

When I recently told an acquaintance that I study and teach in a Department of English Language & Literature, they commented that I must be a real stickler for grammar and vocabulary. In some ways, that’s true. Part of my job is to teach my students to write well and to communicate their ideas effectively. The truth is, however, that I’m much less interested in perfect grammar and spelling than I am in whether or not an idea or argument is conveyed as unambiguously and clearly as possible (especially in academic writing!). After all, even in my own academic and personal writing, I often flout the usual rules or expected usages of grammar. I often start sentences with coordinating conjunctions such as “and” or “but.” I don’t always use semi-colons or dashes properly (although I do try). Ultimately, however, the goal of my writing – and the ways in which I teach my students to write – is to make sure that as much as you can, you try to make sure that your audience knows exactly what you mean to say.

Sometimes, part of clear and unambiguous communication does indeed have to do with grammar, as this wonderful and popular example illustrates.

A wonderfully-designed version of the meme via the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Sometimes, part of clear and unambiguous communication has to do with sentence structure and phrasing. It’s this type of issue, I believe, that lies behind the issues with a recent campaign by Vancouver’s Transit Police, as part of their ongoing series of campaigns and services designed to address harassment on public transportation. As you can see in this photograph, the poster suggests that “not reporting sexual assault is the real shame” – a phrase which seems to suggest that a failure to report assault is a primary source of shame.

Advertisement by the Vancouver Transit Police. Photograph by Anoushka Ratnarajah.

Vancouver-based artist Anoushka Ratnarajah brought attention to the problems with the poster’s message via an Instagram post, and the story was soon picked up by Ms. Magazine, The Huffington Post, and various other news outlets. The Vancouver chapter of Hollaback!, an international organization dedicated to ending street harassment, issued a powerful statement to the Vancouver Transit Police. Playing on the phrasing of the poster itself, Hollaback! Vancouver’s response was that “we see something, and we’re saying something.” In the end, the Vancouver Transit Police issued an apology: as the CBC reports, they will be taking these posters down, and replacing them.

As was to be expected, perhaps, many of the commenters on social media have painted this pushback against the poster as just another example of “oversensitive feminazi crusading,” arguing that we live in a oversensitive and critical culture where even good-hearted gestures by authorities are being overly-harshly criticized. Just like the recent debates about whether or not so-called “trigger warnings” are useful or necessary, especially in a world where triggers and violence abounds anyway, it seems to be the case that those who have complained or criticized (many of whom are survivors of sexual assault and harassment, including incidents which have taken place on transit) are being characterized as merely reactionary, ungrateful, or sensitive.

To be clear, many of these commenters are missing the point, or choosing to ignore the ways in which activists have suggested that it is not the entirety of the poster, nor all of the Vancouver Transit Police’s initiatives that they take issue with. As Hollaback! Vancouver clearly states: “This is the text from a See Something Say Something Campaign, the real-time, easy-to-use, confidential, texting initiative launched in April by the Vancouver transit police. Transit users can report harassment by texting 87-77-77 and police are notified and can investigate as early as the next stop. This initiative is an important piece in supporting victims, but we hope transit police will reconsider the victim-blaming message sandwiched in their ad.”

More importantly, I think that many people are missing the fundamental problem: despite the VTP’s intentions, the ad is clearly not…well, clear. A very brief close reading – the kind I’d have my students do in my classroom – shows just how these ambiguities work, and how/why the critiques of this poster were justified.

1) Who is the audience?

The advertisement seems to be targeting both victims and bystanders, and does not necessarily make it easy to understand who is being addressed. While “if it doesn’t feel right, it’s wrong” can apply equally to victims and bystanders, the third line seems to focus primarily on the victim: “nobody should touch, gesture, or say anything to YOU.” The last line, the “see something / say something” slogan, seems to suggest that the bystander (the person who may be witnessing an assault or instance of harassment) is being addressed.

2) What is the source of shame? Who is it placed on?

Because there are two different audiences being addressed, it becomes confusing as to who, exactly, the shame is meant to be placed on.

Is it meant to be the bystander, who sits/stands by and does nothing?

Does this assume that the bystander CAN or should intervene physically? Or is the shame, as phrased, in not reporting after the assault?

Are bystanders meant to feel shame for not reporting an assault on a passenger?

Is shame actually a productive way of forming a community of care?

Or, as many others, including myself, have pointed out, is it intended to reach the victim? Should victims feel shame for not reporting their assaults, and, presumably, not “helping to prevent” future assaults?

Again: is shame a productive or useful way to get victims to report or seek help?

I hope it’s evident, at this point, that you can unpack a lot of issues with audience and intended meaning just from one short phrase. That, after all, is the power of language: a lot can be said with very few words. The next step, however, is to figure out how this poster can avoid some of these communicative problems.

3) A simple question: how can we modify or re-write this phrase in order to have a less ambiguous and potentially harmful meaning?

A simple suggestion: “There is no shame in reporting sexual assault.”

As you can see, we haven’t taken shame out of the linguistic equation. We’ve simply rearranged it. After all, the problem isn’t using the word “shame”. Rather, it’s how, when, why, and where we use it. Articulating the fact that victims of sexual assault or harassment often feel shame is incredibly important to acknowledge. When it comes to street harassment, or incidents that are often perceived as “minor,” it’s easy for victims to feel ashamed, to worry that they won’t be taken seriously, to wonder if they provoked it. Shame and sexual violence too-often go hand in hand. As you can see, if you read through many of the stories collected by the Vancouver initiative “Harassment on Translink,” feelings of shame and guilt still abound.

It’s our job (all of us, including the authorities) to make an effort to make sure that we are recognizing the possible experience of shame, rather than suggesting (even inadvertently), that sexual assault survivors should feel a sense of shame for their inaction. We all want sexual assault and harassment to end, and we acknowledge that reporting can be, and clearly is, a part of that effort.

But I cannot say it enough: reporting sexual assault is NOT a victim’s DUTY. It is one option, and it is the absolute right of the survivor to choose whichever option is safest and best for them. It is all too easy for those who have never had to report, or for whom reporting may have been relatively easy and/or offered justice/healing, that it is a simple and necessary task.

Ultimately, what I take away from this incident is a difficult truth: despite the fact that we use it every single day—no matter which language we speak, read, or sign— language is a very tricky business. Whether it be from one language to another, whether it be from one context to another, whether it be from the way we understand something to the ways that others read, hear, or interpret it, we have all been in situations where our words have missed their mark. We all know what it’s like for something to get lost in translation. Sometimes, of course, we don’t realize it until someone’s pointed it out to us.

When we call others out for their use of language (whether their words are explicitly or implicitly harmful), many of us do it because we believe that change can happen. We believe that we can help to educate, to re-frame, or to re-think through a particular problem in how ideas are expressed. As the CBC’s interview with Constable Anne Drennan notes, this is precisely the outcome of the critiques and feedback that individuals and organizations offered:

“When the complaints began to arrive, they started looking at the ads from a different perspective, Drennan says.

“We [could] see where they are coming from,” she says.

The ads will be taken down over the coming days as cars return to service yards, Drennan says, and will be replaced by new posters with wording approved by an advisory council that includes representatives from women’s support groups. (CBC)

The old adage that “sticks and stones can break our bones, but words will never hurt us” is, as most of us know, patently untrue. We know the degree of injury can vary, depending on the language used, and depending on the individual who reads or sees the language in question. We know that our “intended” meanings may not necessarily be the received meanings, and it’s important to recognize that good intentions do not devalue or cancel out the harm that can be done. However, I firmly believe that with a greater understanding of the immense power of language (as well as the ability to speak and write about, well, how we speak and write!) we can use our words for great acts of compassion, education, and justice.